The People’s Bank of Govanhill is a long term collaborative project, exploring ways of putting feminist economics into practice in community contexts, collectively ideating radically different economic models beyond capitalism. It is based within the Govanhill area of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, and was initiated by visual artist Ailie Rutherford, during a residency with Govanhill Baths Community Trust (a grassroots organisation formed to save the area’s historic public baths).

Transformative creative practice:

In 2015, Ailie Rutherford began mapping local networks of exchange in Govanhill, and exploring the potential for community currencies. She took these experiments to the streets, often performing as an iceberg – a visual metaphor for the feminist economy. She talked to local people about all the subsistence and care labour hidden blow the water line, and how this contributes to economic value, too.  

“My practice is often about finding accessible ways to talk about feminist economics, so I did this performance in a chip shop, in a kebab house, on the street, encouraging people to add to the iceberg from their own experience. It’s about valuing the forms of labour and the ways of being that have been deliberately undervalued under capitalism – acknowledging that it’s often feminised labour such as care work that has been systematically devalued.” – Ailie Rutherford, Guest at Gray’s lecture, Feb 2022

The People’s Bank of Govanhill has grown from these early performances and currency experiments to include larger scale collaborations and inter-local projects across the globe, with one foot still very much rooted in the local community.

In 2018, Ailie and a team of women opened the Swap Market in a former pawn shop in Govanhill. This was a space to put feminist economics into practice within the local community. Over 1500 residents became members. They used the space to swap goods and skills, and to run music, language and film events. The project reflected Govanhill’s diversity, making space for different cultural backgrounds.

While working on the Swap Market project, the team of women co-organising the space became a more formally constituted women-led collective, the Feminist Exchange Network. This is inclusive of transgender and intersex women as well as non-binary and gender fluid people who are comfortable in a space that centres the experience of women.

Connections to eco-social sustainability:

The People’s Bank and Swap Market projects open up the ‘black box’ of the economy – going beyond the market focus that is so common in the mainstream media. This includes asking questions about planetary heath and the use of the earth’s resources. Feminist perspectives are often holistic, addressing questions of ecological and social wellbeing together. Ailie Rutherford’s practice centres on organising creative and accessible gathering spaces for people to explore these current problems on their own terms, and to create alternative ways of doing things together.

“We work together to build shared spaces, environments and systems that might just allow us to exchange and create in a world that will outlive capitalism… This work is really about connecting with people differently, finding joy together where we can. In a world that is so driven by individualism, competition and greed moments of real connection and collective action seem increasingly important” – Ailie Rutherford Guest at Gray’s lecture, Feb 2022

On learning and evaluation:

The People’s Bank and Swap Market projects work prefiguratively – their feminist aims are modelled by the project organisation in the design of all the activities. The rapid growth of the Swap Market led to reflection and further experimentation with modes of feminist governance. Rutherford and her colleagues Carmen Sawers, Caroline Darke and Elisa Bujokova now co-run a Community Interest Company called the Feminist Exchange Network, which also includes 20 associate members.

“What does feminist governance look like? How do we ensure that we don’t fall into the standard hierarchies as we grow? Or when things take us by surprise. It’s quite easy to do things in a way that counters the capitalist model when you’ve got plenty of time to think about it but when things take you by surprise you can more easily fall into those norms.” Ailie Rutherford

Nominator:

“The swap market, it’s such a simple thing – you bring something you take something away. It’s a rule set that allows people to spend time together. It allows people to think critically about something that’s part of their every day…It might be the first time anyone’s ever invited them to question what money is, or to think about the fact that they provide free care. It opens up the space to have different kinds of conversations – people start to question something that so fundamental as money and our relationship with it.” – Ruth Catlow, Furtherfield

Learn More:

People’s Bank and FEN website

Project credits:

Artists and activists who have collaborated with The People’s Bank of Govanhill, Feminist Exchange Network and Swap Market include: Ailie Rutherford, Inga Zaiceva, Calina Toqir, Monster Chetwynd, Rabiya Choudhry, Ellie Harrison, Zara Kitson, Rae-Yen Song, Sibell Barrowclough, Usma Ashraf, Rahela Cirpaci, Altron Hamilton, Alaya Ang, Najma Abukar, Carmen Sawers, Brian Morgan, Nadine Gorency, Katherine MacKinnon, Caroline Darke, Shreya Agarwal, Bettina Nissen, Libby Odai, Chrissie Ardill, Vishwanath Pasumarthi, Foxy, Dania Thomas, Raman Mundair, Elaine Gallagher, Layla-Roxanne Hill, AB Silvera, Sapna Agarwal, Deniz Uster, Magpie, Rumpus Room, Nat Walpole, Bob Moyler, Jean Cameron, Re-Peat, UNA festival, Saoirse Amira Anis, Mandy Roberts, Zineerah Ali, Maria Tolia, Thelma Okey-Adibe, Teresa Feldmann, COCO Collective, Más Arte Más Acción, Colectiva Curuba, Elsa Caucus, Padmini Ray-Marray and Arts Initiative Tokyo. 

Context:

David Burns and Austin Young use fruit as a starting point for artistic exploration. Working under the name Fallen Fruit (originally with Matias Viegener) the duo has produced a series of participatory artworks that explore the cultural and social lives of fruit trees. They began this work in 2004 by mapping the location of fruit trees in public space, using digital platforms to make fruit trees more visible a common resource. From there, the duo moved to planting new fruit trees as part of participatory events that bring together local communities, plus cultural and municipal leaders. The Endless Orchard online mapping platform invites visitors to log their local public fruit trees and to plant new trees of their own, participating in what the duo call the world’s largest public artwork ‘a noncontiguous public fruit orchard planted, mapped shared and cared for by everyone who participates’.

Hope Builders: Fallen Fruit – PBS PSA for KVCR, produced and directed by Maria Burton.

Connections to eco-sustainability:

“Trees that are planted in public space save money because of their impact on the environment and public health. Public fruit trees benefit the environment by catching rainwater they also remove CO² and other pollutants from the air. They reduce crime – there are several theories as to why, whether they draw more people into public spaces, they foster community cohesion. It changes the nature and feeling of a neighbourhood” – Austin Young

Fallen Fruit combine multiple forms of artistic, cultural and environmental production, engaging a variety of different audiences in their work. Planting fruit trees delivers direct eco-social benefits for soil and air, as well as providing a long-lasting healthy food sources for humans and other species. However as Young points out, their practice also has an aesthetic dimension. It changes the feeling of a neighbourhood and shifts the relationships within it.

Transformative creative practices:

“Sometimes people don’t understand how planting fruit trees could be art. But when I think about art in the 21^st century I think that the role art has in our lives is to capture our imagination about something that we think we already know, and allow us to open our mind even more. The work we do, we do that in a way that doesn’t look like a photograph, a painting or a sculpture but the impression and the effect it has on people has the same effect as art is supposed to do.” – David Burns

When tree planting is performed as a cultural practice, the acts of digging, planting and nurturing fruit trees become part of a wider set of imaginative explorations – in this case, Fallen Fruit ask: what might future cities be like, if shared food growing was prioritised? Fallen Fruit’s recent creations explore historical depictions of fruit in institutional archives. They have created large-scale wallcoverings that blend botanical and creative renderings of fruit. These are immersive portraits of specific places, through which fruit has travelled – as commodities, scientific specimens and forms of pleasure.

Learn more:

Visit the Fallen Fruit website – https://fallenfruit.org/

Visit the Endless Orchard fruit map – https://endlessorchard.com/

Nominator:

“So they started as a collective of people mapping fruit trees in a city…there wasn’t any transformational narrative at the beginning, but then it started to grow when they started adding all kinds of art”. – Markéta Dolejšová

Project credits:

Fallen Fruit – David Allen Burns and Austin Young

Linked video – Hope Builders: Fallen Fruit – PBS PSA for KVCR; produced and directed by Maria Burton.

In 2020, a large law firm in the Netherlands began drafting a legal structure for ‘zoöperation’ (a portmanteau of the Greek word zoë and co-operation), using existing elements of Dutch law. In short, more-than-human interests are represented within a zoöp through the creation of a Zoönomic Foundation that is ‘bound by its charter to only act on behalf of the multispecies ecological community at the organisations’ piece of earth’[1]. Through this mechanism, the interests of more-than-humans are represented in the management of the land. The protocol is currently being test and refined in several test sites (called ‘proto-zoöps’) including a farm, a hotel, a university and a cultural institution.

This project was chosen because of its intertwined imaginative experiments and practical outcomes. At a time when the destructive impacts of human-centric governance are becoming clearer than ever, the Zoöp project challenges creative publics and land stewards to conceive of new kinds of relations between humans and more-than-humans, that acknowledge our mutual reliance. The emerging governance framework of zoöperation affords land stewards ways to make visible the more-than-humans that live alongside them, and to find new ways to recognise their rights to life. 

“Zoöps lead to increased biodiversity, growth in biomass, cleaner air, cleaner water, and benefit the quality of life of nonhumans as well as humans.” – Zoöp website

“I can imagine myself ten years in the future, encountering Zoöps every day. This is an incredibly promising seed for a grassroots movement of regenerative land stewardship”

Lara